Written in the late 1800s primarily as a response to
actual events in the authors life, Charlotte Perkins Gilmans
The Yellow Wallpaper and its jarring statement against
patriarchal society (most specifically against a patriarchal
medical field) continues to be relevant in literary and theoretical
discussions regarding the female Other and the politics
of gender. A pioneer of feminist writing, Gilman indeed
presents us with a complex and multi-layered text that, as Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, illustrates well the anxiety-inducing
connections between what women writers tend to see as their parallel
confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies
(emphasis added; 89). For Gilbert and Gubar, as for many critics
that precede and follow them, the significance of Gilmans
The Yellow Wallpaper lies precisely in its role as
a feminine text about feminine textuality; it is in its truest
and most politically salient form the woman writers text
and story. Although, needless to say, these readings of
Gilmans story have strengthened the relation between the
literary text and its relation to gender politics and identity
formation, I propose that given the emergence of the concept
of Otherness in critical theory, it is useful to engage Gilmans
text with notions of Otherness that go beyond the gendered Other.

In fact, the continued significance of The Yellow Wallpaper
lies in part it in its ability to evoke the question of marginalization
on the level of subjectivity itself. Jane, the narrator-protagonist
finds herself embodying Otherness on more than one level: Jane
is female, Jane is an artist and Jane is mentally ill. Unreasonableness
and irrationality, the qualities against which the
patriarchal Western center defines itself, are according to that
center qualities expressed through her gender, her vocation,
and her mental state. However, up to this point in the critical
history of The Yellow Wallpaper, Janes gender
and her vocation have taken center stage over her mental state
in the discussions concerning this text. My reading of
The Yellow Wallpaper proposes to take her mental
illness as the focal point of the text, contending that we cannot
ignore like John, the narrators husband and physician,
the indications of the nature and extent of her illness.
In viewing Jane only as a woman in need of escaping the
strangling hold of the patriarchal system of order,
we risk repeating Johns mistake by either ignoring the
very fact of Janes illness or by attributing her illness
to an erroneous source.1 Whereas John asserts,
according to Jane herself, that Jane is not ill but merely depressed,
our lack of attention to Jane's mental state produces a similar
diagnosis: Jane is not ill; she is merely oppressed.
Such a reading of Janes condition discards the significant
possibility that Jane is oppressed because she is ill. This essay,
then, takes into consideration the specifics and symptoms of
Janes mental illness in order to consider this possibility.
In place of reading The Yellow Wallpaper primarily
as a feminine text, I will read it as a psychotics text.
The purpose of this is not to foreclose future feminist readings
but rather to open further avenues for understanding Janes
condition beyond those already explored and to encourage the
continuance of an already forged relationship between feminism
and psychoanalysis.

In my reading, Janes inability to fit properly into
the symbolic order of phallogocentric Western society is an inability
rooted in her illness rather than her gender. And the medical
field, ill-equipped to deal with such a subject, precipitates
her final and unfortunate decline. Thus, the final scene of The
Yellow Wallpaper is not the site of Jane's triumphant liberation
or of the materialization of her self-identity as some readings
have purported. These readings fail to note that at the end of
the story Jane has identified herself with an imaginary figure
which has left her crawling around on the floor like a child
and likely more vulnerable to harmful treatment than before.
In any case, whether or not Jane has broken free of the strangling
hold of the patriarchal symbolic order seems irrelevant considering
the predicament she is left in. Presenting disturbing evidence
of a psychotic break, Jane seems destined to a darker fate than
that already intimated in her journal.

Lacanian Psychosis

Before reading Janes predicament in relation to Lacanian
psychosis, we should have an understanding of what it involves.
According to Bruce Fink, psychosis is defined as the mental state
of an individual who has foreclosed or radical[ly] reject[ed]
a particular element from the symbolic order (that is, from language)
(Fink 79). In his seminar entitled The Psychoses, Jacques
Lacan explains: It can happen that a subject refuses access
to his symbolic world to something that he has nevertheless experienced,
which in this case [the case of the psychotic] is the threat
of castration (12). That is, the psychotic like the
neurotic or normal subject of the symbolic order
is exposed to the threat of castration, but unlike the neurotic,
the psychotic, does not experience this threat symbolically.
This threat of castration manifests itself in the fathers
prohibition, in his verbal No, or in the symbolic
authority attached to the fathers name, what Lacan calls
the paternal function or the Name-of-the-Father.2
It is through the Name-of-the-Father, through the prohibition
and interruption of the paternal function, that the individual
in childhood is separated from the mother and her jouissance
and introduced into the symbolic order.

Before this move to the symbolic order is made, the individual
has already, during what Lacan calls the mirror stage, begun
to organize the early chaos of perceptions and sensations,
feelings and impressions into some type of structure (Fink
88). This structure is the imaginary register, spurred
by the child's visual recognition of his image in the mirror
and his parents' reaction to that recognition. Constituting
visual images, auditory, olfactory, and other sense perceptions
of all kinds, and fantasy, the imaginary register forms
prior to the individual's internalization of the paternal function,
and serves as a structural foundation for the symbolic register
(Fink 88). In the imaginary, the real is perceived but
does not have meaning such as it would in the symbolic. Meaning
is inoperative in the imaginary and impossible in the real.
It is the paternal function, a symbolic function embodied in
the father and/or the authority he represents, which enables
the individual to make the move from an imaginary
relation to the real to a symbolic (meaningful)
relation to it. If paternal function works as it should,
the imaginary register characterized by affect is restructured,
rewritten, or 'overwritten' by the symbolic and the individual
becomes a subject of language (Fink 88). But in the psychotic
the paternal function fails and the Name-of-the-Father is rejected
or foreclosed. Instead of evoking in the subjects imaginary,
the signification of the phallus by bringing to fore
the absence of the real father, the paternal function in the
psychotic is met with the absence of the signifier itself. Lacan
explains: At the point at which the Name-of-the-Father
is summoned a pure and simple hole may thus answer ;
due to the lack of the metaphoric effect, this hole will give
rise to a corresponding hole in the place of phallic signification
(Ecrits 191). Ultimately what the psychotic forecloses
is that element that not only would have granted him/her entrance
into the symbolic order, but also and more importantly that grounds
or anchors the symbolic order as a whole (Fink 79).

This foreclosure of the paternal function in the psychotic
prevents the overwriting of the imaginary by the symbolic. The
psychotic then is stuck in an unmediated relationship with the
real. Language, as the ultimate buffer against the devastating
(m)Other, against jouissance, is not effective for the
psychotic. This does not mean that he cannot speak in his native
language, but that unlike a normal subject, the psychotic
does not have a meaningful relationship to the real through
language. Language in the psychotic cannot perform its proper
function, to fill the gap left by the separation
of mother and child; the psychotic, having foreclosed the Name-of-the-Father,
has not experienced this separation and thus does not experience
the lack that can be compensated for through language. Fink explains
that although the symbolic (language) is assimilated by the psychotic
through imitation, it is never truly internalized. According
to Fink, that the psychotic never internalizes language is confirmed
by the fact that [psychotics] are unable to create
new metaphors (90). Whereas the normal subject
can create new meanings by substituting one noun for another,
in this manner making possible the meaningfulness of language,
the psychotic cannot create metaphoric meaning but rather, according
to Lacan, only a meaning that refers above all to meaning
as such (The Psychoses 33). Because of this, the
psychotics relationship to the real is fixed and overbearing.
This is a result of the lack of the paternal metaphor, which
according to Lacan is the essential metaphor, the first
substitution which allows for substitutions thereafter. But without
this paternal metaphor, in the absence of the fundamental
button tie that links the father's name or No! with
the other's desire, signification is impossible and the
psychotic is left to deal with words and meanings, signifiers
and signified, [that] are condemned to drift aimlessly
(Fink 107). Thus, a psychotic's relation to the real and to language
is tragically marked by the absence or failure of the paternal
function, and the psychotic is destined to permanent exclusion
from the symbolic order; this failure to assimilate the structure
of language can never be reversed. Thus, in the psychoanalytic
analysis, if the paternal function fails, no amount of psychoanalytic
treatment will restore the damage.

The psychotic may remain undisturbed by this confused relationship
to language and to the real prior to a confrontation with the
purely symbolic father in his or her adolescent or adult life.
Indeed, it is not until after a psychotic break that the irregularity
of psychotics comes to light. And, according to Lacan, for
psychosis to be triggered, the Name-of-the-Fatherverworfen,
foreclosed, that is, never having come to the place of the Other
3/4 must be summoned to that place in symbolic opposition to
the subject (206). In other words, it is, as Fink
explains, [an] encounter with the One-father, with the
Father as a pure symbolic function ... that leads to ... a psychotic
break (106). This break is the manifestation of the
breakdown of the imaginary structure that has up to then ordered
the way the psychotic perceives the world. Marked by hallucinations,
delusions, paranoia and discernible language disturbances, the
psychotic break in is followed by his attempt to restructure,
through a delusional metaphor, the world and his
relation to it. I will argue that this is the case of Jane
in The Yellow Wallpaper.

Jane as Lacanian Psychotic

From the onset of The Yellow Wallpaper, one can
see that Jane, the narrator of the story, is disturbed in some
way. In her first journal entries, the narrator herself
expresses a desire for relief  and explains that
because her husband John does not believe that she is sick she
does not get well faster (2). Her writing seems
rushed, choppy, and frantic; one can begin to see in Jane's disconnected
paragraphs (some of which are only one sentence long) that Jane
has an unusual relation to language. In spite of her frenzied
style of writing and within these fragmented early entries, Jane
manages to expose two important pieces of information.
First, Jane tells us that John has moved the family to a country
home in an attempt to treat Jane's nervous weakness.
This is important because it illustrates that both John and,
to some extent Jane herself, have noticed a disturbance in Jane
perceptible enough to require the relocation. Not only
does this point to a clear materialization of what is possibly
a psychotic break, but, it also suggests that if Jane is psychotic,
her confrontation with the One-Father has happened prior to their
moving to the country home. Thus, it may not, as is often assumed,
be the wallpaper that drives Jane mad or her oppression as woman
that leads her to read or write the wallpaper.
Indeed, it may be that her illness itself produces her relation
to the wallpaper.

The second piece of information that Jane provides early on
in the story is of utmost importance in diagnosing Jane as a
psychotic because it points to what has triggered her psychotic
break and subsequent hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and
language disturbances. Jane, however briefly, mentions
that she has recently had a baby. Although only a few sentences
are dedicated to this topic, the anxiety and nervousness the
mere topic produces is marked by an exclamation point, a paragraph
break, and the use of italics3 Such a
dear baby! [end of paragraph] And yet I cannot be with
him, it makes me so nervouscan be read as an indication
of the possible connection between this occurrence (the babys
birth) and her subsequent breakdown (5). I would suggest
that, in fact, Jane in giving birth has come in contact with
the One-Father or the father repressed in the real.4
This confrontation with the One-Father could have been experienced
in one of two ways: In the new baby itself Jane could have
recognized the Name-of-the-Father as that name (the surname)
which is given to the child by the father... the name that
comes from the father, or (and this seems more likely)
in her husband's new role as father (Fink 244, n2). According
to Lacan, the One-Father responsible for the psychotic break
can present itself to a new mother in her husband's face
(Ecrits 207). During this brief mention of
the baby, Jane also makes note of John's lack of anxiety in view
of his new paternal role: I suppose John never was nervous
in his life (Gilman 5). This observation is made
immediately after she expresses her anxiety about motherhood.
Thus, it suggests that Jane has perceived the significance of
John's role as father, the paternal function to which she cannot
relate.

Identifying the One-Father in The Yellow Wallpaper
guides our reading of the remainder of Jane's narrative. We can
now conclude that what Jane sees in the wallpaper is not merely
an imagined representation of the narrator herself, a projection
of her own confinement but a case of delusion belief
(The Psychoses 75). According to Lacan, the hallucinations
tied to psychosis require not only that the individual believe
that he is seeing what he is seeing, but that the individual
believein what he or she is seeing. This certainty
characteristic of psychosis is evident in Jane throughout the
text. Although Jane's writing style is chaotic, her tone is always
certain. Her voice may be meek or dutiful when speaking to or
about her husband, but this should not be confused with uncertainty.
Jane is always sure that she is perceiving what she is perceiving
even if she does not understand what it may mean. Furthermore,
her certainty takes on a paranoid quality. She is certain there
is something wrong with the house, an observation which she writes
down twice within the first few pages: Still I will
proudly declare that there is something queer about it [the
house] (emphasis added; 1) and [T]here is something
strange about the house; I can feel it (3). She is certain
there are people in the garden and a woman in the wallpaper:
now I am quite sure it is a woman (emphasis
added; 13). And again, she is certain that John and Jennie
are as affected by the wallpaper as she is (an assertion she
makes several times): Ive caught him several times
looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie
with her hand on it once I know she was studying the pattern
(13-14), and but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly
affected by it (17). Janes narrative is full
of declarations and assertions such as these.

This certainty is only more obvious as her narrative continues.
Scattered generously throughout are phrases such as the
fact is, I am convinced, and I know.
But, more importantly, it is Janes belief that she has
a special relation to what she perceives, to her hallucinations,
that indicates Janes psychosis. Lacan explains the
psychotics delusional belief:

Reality is not the issue. The subject admits, by means of
all the verbally expressed explanatory detours at his disposal,
that these phenomena are of another order than the real. He is
well aware that their reality is uncertain. He even admits their
unreality up to a certain point. But, contrary to the normal
subject for whom reality is always in the right place, he is
certain of something, which is that what is at issueranging
from hallucination to interpretationregards him Even
when he expresses himself along the lines of saying that what
he experiences is not of the order of reality, this does not
affect his certainty that it concerns him. (The Psychoses
75)

This particularly applies to Jane's hallucination of the woman
in the wallpaper. Jane is convinced that only she has discovered
or must discover what is hidden in the wallpaper. At one point
she states, There are things in that paper that nobody
knows but me, or ever will (10). A few entries later
she ascertains, there is one marked peculiarity about this
paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself (12).
Both statements illustrate Janes delusions of grandeur
and her belief that she, as Fink states about the typical psychotic,
has been chosen among all others to possess
such knowledge (84). Thus, that others such as John do not see
the woman in the wallpaper in some way further validates Janes
belief in the woman. In addition, Janes obsession with
freeing the woman in the wallpaper emerges from her conviction
that only she can help the trapped woman, conviction which further
illustrates Janes delusion.5

Although Janes hallucinations and the certainty she
displays regarding them are convincing indications of her psychosis,
further analysis of her narrative provides other noteworthy signs
of her illness. One especially interesting manifestation of her
psychosis is her writing. Janes writing is a materialization
of her distorted relationship to language and thus of her psychosis,
not only because it is choppy and frenetic in style, but for
the simple fact that it is happening continuously. Her insistence
on writing, even when she must do it in secrecy, and her contradicting
views on writing echo another psychotics writing experience,
that of the psychotic Bronzehelmet. Fink explains that
Roger Bronzehelmet, a patient of psychoanalyst Jean-Claude Schaetzel,
expressed both being frightened by words and feeling comfort
in writing. He quotes Bronzehelmet: Words frighten me.
I've always wanted to write, but couldn't manage to put a word
on a thing ... It was as though the words slipped off things
(Fink 107). Nevertheless, Fink explains, Bronzehelmet [felt]
a bit safer when he [wrote] things down, as writing seems to
fix or freeze meaning to some extent (Fink 107). Like Jane,
Bronzehelmet experienced both relief and anxiety in his writing.

Indeed, Janes writing is marked by her conflicted relation
to it.6 Several times during her narrative she expresses
that writing makes her feel better: I think sometimes that
if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve
the press of ideas and rest me (Gilman 6). However,
she also claims several times that writing exhausts her: I
did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust
me a good dealhaving to be so sly about it, or else meet
with heavy opposition (2). Although this heavy opposition
could refer to John and Jennie, it could also refer to the opposition
that Jane perceives in words themselves. She, like Bronzehelmet,
may feel unable to put a word on a thing. Lacking
the anchoring point or button-tie instantiated
by phallic signification, Jane is unable to attach meaning to
words. Thus, her writing experience, rather than being cathartic
(as it could be for the normal subject), is only more anxiety-producing
and a further revelation of her psychosis: I don't
know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able...But
I must say what I feel and think in some wayit is
such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater
than the relief (9). Moreover, this semiotic bearing is
carried over from her writing itself to her interpretation of
the wallpaper, which she is constantly attempting to retroactively
write into meaning. Writing for Jane is thus problematic because
she has not entered the symbolic order. Whereas for the normal
subject the acceptance of the paternal function guarantees his
or her entrance into the symbolic order (language), which then
functions as a permanent defense against the mOthers jouissance,
for the psychotic, this entrance is unachieved, and he or she
can use language and writing only in imitation. This superficial
use of language rather than effectively holding off the mOthers
jouissance only temporarily distracts her (the Others)
overwhelming desire. Janes last reference to her writing
(the quote provided above) suggests that she is no longer able
to keep this jouissance at bay. In fact, it is after this
section that Jane succumbs to her hallucination of the woman
in the wallpaper and that her decline is fully realized.

As Greg Johnson indicates in his reading of Gilmans
The Yellow Wallpaper, the story as a whole
describes a woman attempting to save herself through her
own writing (523). Indeed, Jane is trying to
save herself from something which I have suggested is the jouissance
of the Other. However, Johnson in his reading of The
Yellow Wallpaper suggests that Jane through her writing
is attempting to save herself from the oppression of the patriarchal
symbolic order. Yet, Jane as a psychotic has no concept of the
symbolic order or of its oppression. Her conflicted relationship
to writing illustrated in the previous section is a result and
an indication of her foreclosure of the paternal function and,
consequently, the symbolic order. Therefore, Jane's writing happens
within the imaginary, not the symbolic and thus is evacuated
of social content. Not only does her narrative hint at her difficulty
in tying signified to signifierthus indicating her exclusion
from the symbolic orderit also seems to be fixated on physical
and perhaps fantastical experience. Jane is affected not by what
the wallpaper represents, as in a metaphoric meaning-structure,
but by its physical manifestations. She is taken by the sight
of its color and pattern; she is amazed by its texture; she smells
it and at some point she even hears it shriek with derision
(19). Thus, it is evident that Jane's relation to the real, that
is to things, to others and to herself, is caught in this imaginary
register of visual images, auditory, olfactory, and other
sense perceptions of all kinds, and fantasy (Fink 88).
Furthermore, her inability to relate to the real through the
symbolic prevents Jane from acquiring the subjectivity which
could ensure the redemption assumed in readings such as Johnsons.
According to Terry Eagleton, the imaginary is the condition
in which we lack any defined centre of self, in which what self
we have seems to pass into objects, and objects into it, in a
ceaseless closed exchange (142). It is only in the
symbolic that we can conceive of ourselves as unified centered
subjects. Thus, I disagree with Johnson when he states that the
narrator's experience should finally be viewed not as a
final catastrophe but as a terrifying, necessary stage in her
progress toward self-identity and personal achievement
(523). The narrator has achieved nothing.

Janice Haney-Peritz in her article Monumental Feminism
and Literatures Ancestral House: Another Look at The
Yellow Wallpaper, a reading in some ways closer to my own,
comes to a similar conclusion about the narrators presumed
achievement. According to Haney-Peritz, readersin particular
feminist readersshould, rather than identify with Jane,
feel sympathy for her (124). Although this reading suggests that
Janes final actions are anything but triumphant, Haney-Peritz
comes to this conclusion based on an erroneous reading of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. In her article, Haney-Peritz provides excellent
definitions of the imaginary and the symbolic, but then argues
that Jane has moved from the symbolic order to the imaginary
realm, a movement brought about by her futile attempts to use
symbolic discourse: Without mediation, the subject has
no access to the symbolic dimension of his or her experience
and is therefore driven to establish the imaginary in the real
(119). Haney-Peritz claims that the reader can see the
exact moment in which the narrator's register shift[s]
from the symbolic to the imaginary and which results in
the narrators ultimate identification with the woman in
the wallpaper (118). This shift she asserts happens when Jane
states, I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper
as I did? (19). The problem with this reading of Janes
narrative and her relation to the woman figure in the wallpaper
is that, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, once the imaginary
has been overwritten it remains so. Likewise, once the subject
arrives at the symbolic, both the imaginary and the symbolic
registers are always present. What Haney-Peritz is suggesting
then is not plausible. Jane could not have made a shift to the
imaginary from the symbolic, at least not in terms of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Such easy and discrete movement amongst registers
entirely belies the complication of each of them that is at the
heart of signification itself. Yet, Janes relationship
to the real towards the end of The Yellow Wallpaper
is, as I have argued above, clearly within the imaginary. In
view of this, it is not as Haney-Peritz contends the shift that
has become apparent; what has become apparent in the narrators
identification with the woman in the wallpaper is that the narrator
has always been in the imaginary, outside of the symbolic.

Indeed, Janes identification with the woman in the wallpaper
at the end of her narrative may be her way of restructuring the
world after her psychotic break. According to Lacan, the encounter
with the One-Father sets off a cascade of reworkings of
the signifier from which the growing disaster of the imaginary
proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified
stabilize in a delusional metaphor (Ecrits 207).
This functions as a new starting point on the basis of which
the psychotic reestablishes a bearable world and a place for
everything in it. Janes relation to this woman, her rebirth
as someone else, no longer Jane but the woman in the wallpaper,
could be an attempt to reconstruct her genealogy, an attempt
characteristic of the psychotic in need of restructuring his
understanding of the world.7 This delusional
metaphor stands in for the paternal metaphor (the original absent/failed
father), which allows for words and meanings to be bound
together in a relatively stable, enduring way and creates
a space and a bearable role for the psychotic (Fink
109).

Final Remarks

In An Unnecessary Maze of Sign-Reading
Mary Jacobus alerts us to a particular problematic of feminist
readings of the The Yellow Wallpaper. She claims
that, [t]he feminist reading contradicts the
tendency to see women as basically unstable or hysterical, simultaneously
(and contradictorily) claiming that women are not mad and that
their madness is not their fault (233). That
is, the tendency of feminist readings is to say on one level
that Janes illness is constructed by a society that imagines
woman as unstable and on another that Jane is ill because of
the oppression of patriarchal society. But this, as Jacobus
points out, is a contradictioneither Jane is ill or she
is not. In my reading Jane is of course ill, and indeed her illness
is related to a paternal, patriarchal structure. But what if,
as Lacan suggests, this is a structure which is immanent to language
itself, rather than imminent within the world Jane inhabits?
This is not to say that the subjects entrance into language
isnt a construction of sorts; by Lacans very definition,
it is. Rather, it is to open up our reading of Gilmans
text to the possibility of a feminist interpretation whose logic
proceeds from the uncertainty of the relationship between gender
and subjectivity to begin with, rather than one which picks up
on the way they are related from within the very constructions
which name them.

Endnotes

1. For John, the medical field to which he belongs, and patriarchy
in general, Janes illness comes from being a woman;
similarly, in certain paradigms of feminism Janes illness
comes from being a woman in a mans world.
In either case, Janes possible mental illness remains untreatable
as such.

2. The Name-of-the-Father is not to be confused with the actual
father. The Name-of-the-Father can be experienced in the
actual father or any such similarly castrating figure
or institution that stands in for the law.

3. The conjunction of these three structural features of emphasis
(the exclamation point, the paragraph break, and the italics)
is unique to this passage. Although emphasis is found elsewhere
in Janes text, this particular matter, the baby, requires,
unlike other matters in the story, emphasis over emphasis.

4. Having failed to overwrite the imaginary and push the subject
into the symbolic, the threat of castration as the father remains
in the real and resurfaces as the One-Father.

5. It is striking that Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs
of My Nervous Illness constitutes much of Freuds initial
speculation on psychosis as well as Lacans later analysis,
like Jane reports hallucinations of multiple heads: there
was a time when souls in nerve-contact with me talked of a plurality
of heads (that is several individuals in one and the same skull)
which they encountered in me and from which they shrank in alarm
crying, For heavens sake that is a human with
several heads. (78). Janes hallucinations are
of a woman that has so many heads (16).

6. Daniel Paul Schreber also has a similarly problematic relationship
to writing as illustrated by what he calls his writing-down-system
(123-129).

7. In On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment
of Psychosis, Lacan explains that Daniel Schreber upon
his psychotic break constructs a delusional genealogy.